Re: Presentation: Adoption and Trends

In the last exciting episode, josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com (Josh Berkus) wrote:
>> Josh, I still need your OK to use your name on the slide talking about
>> open source development structures.
>
> OK, now I've had time to view it.
>
> My one worry is that my pigeonholing of projects by name was based
> on the OSS rumor mill rather than extensive research. For example,
> my putting XFree86 into the "corporate council" category was based
> on a couple of editorials on Slashdot ... hardly reliable
> information.

<http://www.xfree86.org/legal/bod.html> provides some hard information
that doesn't really say anything of the sort.

The "core" seems to be a _little_ different from "corporate council."
>From what I can see (and I'm surely not trying to be unkind to them),
the "core" appears to comprise the set of developers that were working
heavily on XFree86 five years ago. Most of the core joined in 1999;
only one has joined core since, and survived; I'm not sure where Keith
Packard stands in that regard. I think he was in "core" briefly
before his ousting.

It seems more like "sometimes eminent developers" than a "corporate"
council. (The accusation that gets leveled is that some haven't
produced much code lately, but that's not something I would be
competent to point at them.)

The parallels to PostgreSQL are pretty strong, with the difference
that "The XFree86 Project Inc." has all of the formalities associated
with incorporation, notably that officers effectively 'own' part of
the control of the corporation. Which certainly makes extricating
one's self a bit stickier if one's interests change.

> Incidentally, a Debian contributor pointed out that Debian is a
> really good candidate for category #1.

There have been some governance "issues," but that's pretty much true
_any_ time you have an organization of any sort. The fact that
packages are contributed by an enormous, wide-spread set of
geographically and politically distributed individuals sure seems to
fit with category #1.
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